EPISD administrator James Anderson, center, says he now believes an effort to get employees to denounce the FBI was undertaken to benefit then-Superintendent Lorenzo Garcia. (Rudy Gutierrez / El Paso Times)

Before Lorenzo García left the El Paso Independent School District to deal with mounting criminal charges that eventually put him in a federal prison, the former superintendent attempted to pin his trouble on others and discredit federal investigators.

That included crafting statements for employees that defended the school district from a cheating investigation and accused the FBI of intimidation and harassment.

García had help. He hired Ron Ederer, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, who brought in a private investigator named Sam Streep to act as a notary. He had James Anderson, the assistant superintendent of high schools for EPISD, call employees into meetings with Ederer and Streep.

The employees were asked to sign or compose statements that primarily involved complaints over the FBI's investigation into cheating at the school district.

"At the direction of Ron Ederer, EPISD's attorney, and Dr. Garcia, I was directed to contact some employees who had met with the FBI during their investigation, to meet with Mr. Ederer and/or his investigator to prepare a statement describing what they told the FBI and how they were treated during questioning," Anderson said in a written statement to the El Paso Times.

Anderson said he knew of seven employees who prepared the statements, but he did not mention their names. The El Paso Times sought the statements through the state's Public Information Act, but the Texas attorney general allowed the school district to keep them secret.

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"I was not present during the meetings with Mr. Ederer, and I let all employees know that it was completely up to them if they wanted to meet and prepare a statement," Anderson said. "I was not in a position to tell the district's lawyer, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, that I was not going to do as they directed. In retrospect, it appears to me that Dr. García and EPISD's attorney Ron Ederer could have been using the opportunity to get statements from employees not just to protect the district, but to benefit Dr.

Ederer could not be reached for comment. Streep declined to discuss the matter with the El Paso Times.

García is serving 3å years in a Pennsylvania federal prison after pleading guilty in June to two counts of conspiracy to commit mail fraud for scheming to artificially inflate state and federal accountability scores and for steering a $450,000 no-bid contract to his mistress.

But before his guilty plea, García fiercely fought accusations that the district cheated.

The Texas Education Agency in 2010 cleared the EPISD of wrongdoing after then-state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh claimed that administrators were "disappearing" students to boost accountability ratings. Still, cheating allegations continued to dog the district.

The FBI and the U.S. Department of Education in December 2010 launched investigations into allegations that the district had manipulated grade levels and pushed some students out of school, leading García a month later to seek board approval to hire Ederer, who would represent the district in audits and reviews by outside agencies.

In the months that followed, as the U.S. Department of Education seemed to be wrapping up an investigation that appeared to find only minor infractions, García focused on the FBI, which by then appeared to be the only federal agency still pushing forward with its investigation into the cheating scheme.

Employees were asked to sign pre-written affidavits or to craft statements that said the FBI was acting unprofessionally and accused investigating agents of harassment. Those affidavits were intended to help the school district as it lobbied for the FBI to call off its investigation, according to former Bowie Principal Jesus Chavez, who was asked to sign an affidavit but declined.

FBI officials declined to comment because of an ongoing investigation.

District defense

Descriptions of the meetings in which employees were asked to sign notarized statements against the FBI first became public in grievance documents filed by Chavez, which the El Paso Times obtained through the Texas Public Information Act. Two other employees of the EPISD also shared stories with the El Paso Times about statements they were asked to craft or sign that benefited García's argument against allegations of a districtwide cheating scheme.

"We were definitely being pressured, that was without say," said one employee, who spoke to the Times on the condition that his name not be used for fear of retaliation. "García was pacing in the hallways. We were in Anderson's office. I mean to me, I'm an assistant principal, this is my boss's boss's boss, and they call you in to sign something and, yeah, you're expected to sign it, so there was obviously a lot of pressure there."

Chavez, who filed the grievance documents after he was reassigned to central office in April 2012, said García and then-Chief of Staff Terri Jordan approached him at Bowie High's summer graduation on July 21, 2011, and insisted that he sign an affidavit disparaging the FBI. Jordan could not be reached for comment.

Chavez said he was scheduled to discuss his formative evaluation with Anderson on the same day that García and Jordan approached him about the statement. But Chavez said that when he arrived for his evaluation he was ushered into a meeting with Anderson and Streep, the private investigator. He said he was asked to sign a pre-written statement, which suggested that the FBI was not conducting its investigation in a professional manner.

"James Anderson and Sam Streep informed me that this affidavit, along with other signed affidavits by employees, would be sent to the governing body that supervises the El Paso sector of the FBI in an attempt to have them call off the investigation," Chavez wrote.

Chavez said he called his attorney during the meeting and left without signing the statement. In grievance documents protesting the personnel action taken against him, Chavez asked that Anderson "be issued a letter of reprimand for his dishonesty in attempting to get Jesus Chavez to sign a pre-written statement instead of providing him with his formative evaluation."

Anderson in his response said that he was not dishonest and that he made clear to Chavez that signing the statement was optional. He wrote that he was directed by García to cancel the evaluation at the last minute and present a statement drafted by attorneys to Chavez that focused on "addressing the concerns about how the FBI was conducting their investigation."

Anderson also said in his response to the grievance that Chavez had previously discussed the FBI investigation with García, Ederer and Ray Velarde, Garcia's personal lawyer.

Velarde could not be reached for comment.

The EPISD school board rejected Chavez's grievance late last year, and he eventually resigned from the district as the board took steps to fire him.

The EPISD employee who asked not to be named said Anderson had him meet with Ederer twice. The first time, the employee said, he and the attorney discussed the FBI investigation, and the second time the attorney provided him an affidavit to sign that included comments he made during their first meeting, the employee said.

The employee said he signed the statement at a time when he was unhappy with the FBI. The statement was accurate but was slanted to make the FBI look "very heavy-handed," he said, and added that though it included his criticisms of the FBI, it was missing comments he made about García running the district like the mafia.

"At the time, I was a little bit upset because I had gone to the FBI," the employee said. "I told them all that I knew, but a week or two later they had come back to my office, and they asked me about a specific case and we disagreed about one specific thing, and I came back from lunch and here was this definition of perjury under my door.

"I was just trying to be nothing but honest with them and what, were they accusing me of perjury?" he said. "So, at the time I was not very happy with them and I probably played right into García, but in hindsight there is no question we were being used (by García)."

The employee recalled Ederer criticizing Debra Kanof, the assistant U.S. attorney in El Paso who was overseeing the EPISD investigation.

"He sat us down and he said that the FBI was on a fishing expedition and Debra Kanof has lost all kinds of cases, although she had told me she had never lost a case," the employee said. "This guy said, 'No, no I used to be her boss. She's lost all kinds of cases.' "

The employee said his discussions with Ederer came after he was called to meet with Anderson at a McDonald's near the EPISD's headquarters, where he said Anderson spoke to him for about 30 seconds, instructing him to meet with the district's outside attorney.

"All he said was bring so and so and come to my office tomorrow at 10:30 to meet with an attorney, but they were obviously paranoid that their phones were being tapped," the employee said.

Anderson denies that such a conversation took place.

"I did not call any employee into a meeting at a McDonald's to discuss preparing a statement regarding their interview with the FBI," Anderson said in a statement. "The interviews took place at the district's office."

The employee said he later provided a copy of the affidavit to the FBI at the agency's request. He said the FBI told him that the "whole idea of bringing us in to have us sign affidavits was borderline tampering with witnesses."

Blaming a principal

Another EPISD employee, Mark Mendoza, now the director of Texas Title I priority schools in the EPISD, told the Times that García directed him to craft a letter with Anderson that sought to scapegoat then-Jefferson High School Principal Steven Lane and disparage the FBI.

Anderson recalled the situation being connected to Lane's separation agreement with the school district in June 2011, not the affidavits that the district had asked employees to sign concerning the FBI investigation.

Mendoza said he was called into a meeting with García, Anderson and then-Pupil Services Director Dawn Garcia, who died last year.

He said that during the meeting on June 15, 2011, García began complaining that FBI agents were "bothering" employees at the school district with tactics that were threatening and abusive. Mendoza said García told him that several employees felt they were being bullied into saying things and chose to write letters to clarify statements they had made to the FBI.

García showed Mendoza a copy of another employee's affidavit. Mendoza said the document stated the FBI was not interested in telling the truth or listening to anything positive and that the employee felt threatened by the FBI and believed he would go to jail if he did not cooperate.

The letter also criticized Lane's ability to make administrative decisions and defended credit recovery and other methods used to improve student achievement scores, according to Mendoza.

Mendoza said García then asked him to work with Anderson to write his own letter. Anderson's lawyer, Lynn Coyle, said her client could not recall the meeting.

Mendoza said that in October 2009, Damon Murphy, then-associate superintendent of priority schools, told him to take his a team of truant officers to Jefferson and to do whatever Lane needed him to do.

Mendoza said Lane told him that García had ordered him to follow Bowie High's example and reduce the number of students with limited English skills, known as LEP students, by getting truant officers to go to the students' homes to determine whether they lived in the area.

Mendoza said he declined to conduct residence checks on students simply because they had limited English skills and reported the conversation to Jordan. Mendoza said Jordan told García, who denied ordering Lane to game the accountability system and ordered Mendoza to offer training to the principal.

Nearly two years later, as the district faced federal scrutiny for allegations that it had kept low-performing students from taking the state-mandated test that counted toward federal accountability, Mendoza said García wanted him to write a letter suggesting that Lane, on his own initiative, had tried to weed out students who had limited English skills and García had worked to remedy the situation.

Mendoza said García called Lane a "disgruntled" employee who told the FBI that García had devised a cheating scheme at the school district.

Mendoza said he was then fed a narrative that García wanted parroted in a signed statement.

"I was led through a series of events and the series of events were presented to me in such a way that I was being led to believe that the superintendent didn't know anything about this, when I knew because I had made the reports to him that he did," Mendoza said. "I was told that the superintendent had taken the appropriate action to stop these things from happening when I knew that that had not happened.

"I was being asked to provide documentation to defend him from some sort of investigation that was happening at the time," Mendoza said.

On June 16, 2011, Mendoza said, he was supposed to meet with Anderson about a proposed parking structure, but Anderson turned his focus to the letter. He said Anderson reminded him during the meeting that García wanted them to work together on the letter and told him to jot down his thoughts and be prepared to meet with him to finalize the letter.

Neither Mendoza nor Anderson talked about the letter again. Mendoza never wrote the letter.

Anderson said García asked him to see whether Mendoza would be willing to write a letter involving Lane around the time that the principal was separating from the school district. Anderson said García wanted Mendoza to write a letter that stated that any attempts to lower the number of limited English proficient, or LEP, students "were made on Mr. Lane's own initiative and not at the direction of Dr. García."

"I understood that Dr. García was referring to an incident in 2010 when Mr. Mendoza brought to my attention that Mr. Lane was seeking to have residency checks done on all of the LEP students," Anderson said. "At that time, I had a meeting with Mr. Mendoza and Mr. Lane and I put a stop to that effort immediately because it was totally improper and against the well-being of the students."

Mendoza said he never spoke to Anderson about Lane or the conversation he had with the principal in which Lane said García ordered him to lower the number of students with limited English skills at the campus.

Anderson said that if Mendoza "cannot recall this incident, his truant officers should remember it well."

"In the end, Mr. Mendoza did not prepare a letter and I did not take any further steps on that directive from Dr. García," Anderson said in a statement. "I did not pressure Mr. Mendoza or take any action against him for not preparing a statement. I had no reason to. Mr. Mendoza never expressed any concerns to me about this matter."

Mendoza said he was uncomfortable with García's directive because he believed that García and Anderson were attempting to use Lane as a scapegoat.

Lane, one of a handful of former principals who told the Times last year that they faced retaliation for standing up to García, said he did not know that Mendoza had been asked to draft a statement against him but he recalled hearing a similar story from one of his assistant principals.

"Deep in the corner of the parking lot I had one assistant principal tell me they were being forced to sign affidavits against me, saying I was a bad guy and she said that she refused to sign it," Lane said. "I told her, 'These people will do you in. Don't worry about me.' I knew what I was doing when I decided to fight."

Lane said he doesn't blame employees for signing statements against him.

"That was cooked up by Anderson and García," Lane said. "Maybe not everyone, but eventually most people suffer the consequences of their actions. I'm not serving time in prison in Pennsylvania and I'm not on the agenda to be fired."

The El Paso Independent School District has started the process of firing Anderson as part of the district's investigation into the cheating scheme that denied an untold number of students a proper education.

District officials at a public meeting last month spoke broadly as they proposed firing him after they said he did not do enough to stop the cheating scheme.

Anderson's participation in asking employees to meet with a district lawyer to discuss the affidavits was not cited as a reason for his proposed termination.

Anderson and his lawyer have argued that the school district is retaliating against him because in November he told the El Paso Times that he had tried to alert the Texas Education Agency to possible cheating at Bowie High School in June 2010 after he learned that a counselor had identified 77 transcripts containing grade and grade level manipulations.

He plans to appeal the district's decision to fire him.

Zahira Torres may be reached at ztorres@elpasotimes.co;m 512-479-6606.